At the present time the application of such decorative stones to sheet materials and/or fabric is relatively expensive. Production costs are increased by the fact that in many cases there is a customer demand for fabrics which are not decorated all over their area but only in certain places. The application of decorative articles to specific areas is very expensive if the decorative cover factor, that is to say, the ratio between the total area of the sheet material and the decorated areas, is low due to the fact that the machines applying the decorative articles operate with low efficiency when fabrics or other sheet material have to be positioned on the machine and then taken off after a relatively small number of decorating operations. In general, the positioning and removal of the sheet materials on such machines is largely done by hand and, in consequence, a large number of hand manipulations for a small number of decorative operations renders the decoration relatively costly.
When making up decorative sheet material into garments and the like, the cutting pattern has to be very carefully laid out in view of the fact that in the made-up garment, the decorated areas have to be correctly positioned. The need for matching the cut parts of the garment to be made as regards the position of the decorations will produce much more waste than in the case of undecorated fabrics. In garment making, during cutting it is usual to do the cutting simultaneously on a relatively large number of layers of material stacked one on top of the other. This technique is very difficult in the case of locally embroidered fabrics due to the varying thicknesses of the fabrics carrying the embroidered portions in the stack.